


It Calls Me

by Write_like_an_American



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alien Culture, Everything Changed When The Spaceship Crashed, M/M, Moana inspired, Primitive Culture, Worldbuilding, how the spacedads first met, only not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-17 07:39:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9311858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Write_like_an_American/pseuds/Write_like_an_American
Summary: There's a line where the stars meet the trees and it calls him...Yondu's place is in his village, but his dreams are with the stars. A present/collab challenge for RedRarebit, shamelessly inspired by Disney's Moana.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RedRarebit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedRarebit/gifts).



> Part of a writing challenge/gift fic exchange with RedRarebit, my brother-from-another-mother. I had so much fun writing this, then agonized over whether it was good enough. But hey - as I'm not overly happy with it, it gives me an excuse to expand it into a multi-chapter origins story at some point in the future... ;D

**Anthropological Study A6319, the first and only study undertaken on the Zatoan Centauri tribe. Information retrieved by hidden camera. Zatoan remain uncontacted. We hear a Zatoan creation legend, transcribed from Chief Udonta III and translated into Galactic Common by Deraav Saal, University of Xandar, Anthropology Department; Galactic Date 08jU8/90uj8. One of several files destroyed by the Ravager hack of the Nova mainframe, in the year following Irani Rael’s ascension to the office of Prime.**

“In the beginning there was silence. And then the Great God Anthos, may he be praised, put his lips together and blew.

From that whistle came the wind, and from his spit came the sea. The Great God Anthos, may he be praised, folded himself a thousand times. He knelt and he grunted and he broke both arms and legs, compacting smaller and smaller, compressing his sacrosanct body **[Translator’s note 1]** into the mass of teeming life that we now call home.

And this, our sacred mountain? You stand on the Great God’s face (may he be praised). From this place, from this very plateau, he watches over his Kingdom. He watches the twin suns rise and the twin suns set. He watches the _Aku_ swoop on their prey from the rocky heights, and the _Yolopp_ **[Translator’s note 2]** drag them into the swampy depths. He feels every creeper twitch and every vine grow. He knows all of us, not by name but by pouchbond. **[Translator’s note 3]** Yes, even you, Little One.

The Great God Anthos (may he be praised) knows all creation, because we are all are born **[Translator’s note 4]** from him. You, me, the larvae and fungi beneath the rotting woodtrunk, the food-beasts and the tame-beasts and the predator-beasts too… We are all Anthos.

And beyond Anthos? There is nothingness.”

The chief’s voice takes on a determined edge. On the corresponding camera feed, we watch him pace. He is silhouetted against the roaring village bonfire, visible through the gap between the crude frame and the door-hanging, currently dropped for privacy. Before him, cross-legged on the floor, sits the subject of his lecture – a child of five, crest the height of an upraised pinky finger. He is more interested in extracting his thumbnail via suction than listening.

“Little One, I see you try to catch those faraway lights. You will never reach them. There is nothing _to_ reach. Anthos painted a thousand skies, but they are only the linings of his nest. Were you to journey to the stars, you would find them cold and empty, their wicks long-extinguished, devoid of all life. Better that you stick to catching fireflies, Little One. They are Anthos, like you and me. And unlike the stars, the fireflies are in reach.”

The thumb is sucked with gusto – not that that prevents the boy from replying. “Bu’ the stars sing so pwetty –“ **[Translation note 5]**

“Oh, Little One. You say the silliest things. If you want singing, look to your feet, not to the sky above. Feel the churn of lava beneath the earth – that is the blood in Anthos’s veins. Flow with it like your mother does, as her warband dance in dedication to Anthos before the hunt. Their song is in you, as it is in all of us who are born-of-Anthos. And you must learn it so you may pass it along – for the future of the village lies in you, my son. I did not carry you in my pouch six months so that you could waste your days star-gazing.”

There is no response, but the silence has a sulky timbre. The Chieftain knuckles his creased forehead. Stepping closer, he kneels at the child’s level, pinching his small blue chin between thumb and forefinger and squeezing until the thumb pops out.

“Little One, you must listen to your father. Any singing you hear is a reflection of Anthos’s own music. The stars are silent and dead, and they always will be.”

“ _I_ hear dem sing. Maybe dey jus’ don’ wike you.” **[Translator’s note 6]**

The chief tugs his crest-tip in frustration. Firelight spills across his back like sunbeams through water, constantly flickering and changing. It illuminates navy tattoos, copies of those drawn on his son.

“We will continue this later. This is not why I summoned you here. What was I saying…? Oh yes. Little One, Anthos watches you always. He watches as you play, and dance, and whistle. He watches as your mother teaches you to hunt and I teach you to pray and sacrifice; he watches as you grow into the great chieftain that this village deserves. Anthos knows all.”

The boy looks longingly at his extracted thumb, the dirt clods around his scrunching toes, the fronds of his loincloth: anywhere except his father. He knows what’s coming.

“And so,” the chief continues, voice raising. “When you lie you are not just lying to me. You are not just lying to your people _._ Oh no – you are lying to Anthos himself. I will ask you again, Little One. Yondu. Did you, or did you not, steal the honeycake your Aunt Oola made for tonight’s offering?”

**[1: The Centaurian language contains too many religious adjectives for exact interpretation.]**

**[2: _Aku_ are birds the size of Nova cruisers that plague the mountain villages. They are carnivorous, devouring unguarded livestock and children. Their danger is part of daily life, to the point where a child tardy to dinner is jokingly referred to as ‘C’xqkqik’xq’, or ‘Food of the Aku’. _Yolopp_ live in the deepswamp, where only initiated Zatoan hunters go. Little is known about them and no specimen has ever been recovered, alive or dead. Because of this, most anthropologists believe _Yolopp_ to be Zatoan cryptids: stories hunters tell around the fire.]**

**[3: ‘Pouchbond’ is a literal translation, referring to the link between male parent and offspring. This is far more emotionally complex than what is commonly understood by the Xandarian term ‘fatherhood’. ‘Pouchbond’ is in fact directly comparable to ‘breastbond’, which signifies the dependency of mother-infant relationships.]**  

**[4: ‘Born’ here implies pouch birth, rather than the mother’s egg-laying. I have elected to remove further ‘may he be praised’ dedications for ease of reading.]**

**[5: It is difficult to describe the effect of sucking one’s thumb on the Zatoan language. To Xandarian ears, it might actually increase clarity.]**

**[6: However, while thumbsucking makes Zatoan more intelligible to Xandarian listeners, pouting does the language few favors.]**

 

* * *

 

The forest was never silent.

He remembers that in hindsight. Nowadays, Yondu knows silence. In the void, the lack of noise is so absolute, so flawless, that your ears turn inwards. They amplify the hiss from your spacemask’s oxygenerators and the crinkle of your leathers, little sounds you never notice until they’re all that’s there. And then, they’re deafening. In space no one hears you scream. But leave you alone too long and you’ll go mad to the pound of your own heart: a tribal drumbeat you can never escape.

Silence is something no planetbound species can imagine. Yondu certainly never gave it much thought, on the nights he crept from his family’s nest and swarmed the _Za’gah_ -tree at the village’s edge, using the carved faces of Anthos’s familiars as hand and foot-holds until he burst through the canopy and stood beneath the majesty of the starry sky. On Alpha Centauri-IV there was never a moment when you couldn’t hear Anthos, not even in the dead of night. The grate of the cicadas was his breath, the rustle of the undergrowth his blinks, and the pad of nocturnal life his stretches. You found Anthos in the wood that was heaped on the crackling village bonfire, stoked at hourly intervals to ward off the _Vash’ryk_ herds that frequented their side of the mountain. He was in the buzz of mosquitoes, and the creak of the reeds they bundled to build their houses, even the burble and slop of the swamp. Omnipresent. Inescapable.

Once upon a time, Yondu’s father described it as an embrace. To a young Centaurian with his eyes on the stars, it was more a stranglehold.

Then one day his stargazing was rewarded. A new star arrived. And unlike the others, this one grew.

First a pinprick. Then a punctuation mark, then the burning pupil in a cosmic eye. It grew and it grew and it grew, until Yondu was convinced it would swallow them entirely. And then it shot by overhead, parting the trees like the wingbeats of an giant _Aku._ It dove into the earth diagonally, carving a slice from the biosphere. And for an indeterminable moment as the forest froze in shock, jolted from millennia of peaceful cyclicity, there was _silence –_ or as close to it as Yondu had ever known _._

Yondu stared at the sky long after the impact echoes faded. He recalled a pinched white face. It had been licked with flaming tongues and twisted in panic, yells drowned by the screeching cacophony of concertina’d trees and tearing metal.

“Anthos alive,” he whispered. “The stars ain’t so dead after all.”

 

* * *

 

**Log 314 from the crashed Nova-ship _Eclector,_ the only known incidence of Empire-contact with the Zatoan tribe _._ A conversation between Chief Udonta III and Huntress Pharaqa, translated into Galactic Common after the _Eclector’s_ return by Deraav Saal, University of Xandar, Anthropology Department; Galactic Date 09jk1/90uj8. Another file destroyed by the Ravager hack.**

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know! Wherever he can see the stars with his insane friend! Perhaps they have wandered into the swamp and been eaten. That would be a blessing,”

An angry inhale, of the sort that typically precedes a lecture.

“You let him escape?”

“Escape, escape! Why do you keep using that word, _iquki-zq_? **[Translator’s note 1]** He is the future chief! Once you revoke your claim on the title, he will go where he chooses! Then there will be no _escape._ His word will be law, and none may stop him!

Snarls veer on whistles. The Zatoan circle each other like hungry wolves.

“Stop him,” growls the chief. “From what?”

The huntress’s click-consonants are barbed as her arrowtips. “You know what! You invite this madman, this pale-skin, this _krz-qa-sza_ **[Translator’s note 2]** into your hut! You let him tell our son stories! And you expect Yondu _not_ to dream of what lays beyond?”

“What lays _beyond?_ Pharaqa, nothing lays beyond. Where there is no Anthos, there can be no life!”

“I have told him this. You have told him this. He _knows_ this. He just refuses to believe it – and I know why. It is because of _him –_ “

“Pharaqa, lower your voice. Our visitor sleeps behind that partition–“

“I refuse! The _krz-qa-sza_ you made a guest in your home, protected by Anthos’s rites of hospitality, is filling our son’s head with nonsense and lies! And worse than that! He is corrupting him, Uzuko. You have seen them together at night. They watch the stars, heads tipping in synchrony, like a mate-pair during the Season –“

A scoff, louder than the pop of blazing logs outside. “Yondu is still young. He has never seen anyone like our guest – no one has. It is natural to be fascinated. You see too much in their friendship.”

“Or I see what you are blind to!”

The pause is pregnant, broken only by heavy breaths and the snap of the fire. Then, softer:

“You are afraid for him. I understand that. But you must not blame the guest. He is deranged, speaking of worlds beyond our own. We welcomed him into our village as an act of mercy; that means he has been received with Athos’s blessing. It would take more than village gossip to banish him.”

Pharaqa’s silence manages to exude petulance – one of many gifts she passed to her son. The chieftain sighs.

“Has _Krah-glyn_ caused any unrest? Has he done anything but speak in his nonsense-tongue, and learn our ways, and watch the stars? He hasn’t seen more than seventeen rain-seasons. He is scarcely a man – and a mad and ugly one at that. What harm can he do? I’m glad Yondu has taken a shine to him. It shows compassion: the mark of a true chief.”

The huntress draws herself up, crest brushing the low hut ceiling. “Or it shows, my chief, that our son is _gsh-ryk,_ **[Translator’s Note 3]** and deserves to be made _krz-qa-sza_ himself –“

Snarl.

“You _dare_ accuse my son –“

“Oh, so he is yours now? Did we not create him twenty-two seasons ago, out of your spiritual strength and my prowess in the hunt? Do I not deserve a say in how we discipline him, even if he is an initiated adult?”

“If we were talking of only discipline, then yes!  But you are talking of _gsh-ryk_ and _krz-qa-sza._ I will not have you sully our son’s name. He leads the hunts, he dances for Anthos. He has inherited our best aspects as well as our worst. He can command the men and entertain the children, and he knows every villager by name. What more could you ask of our future chief?”

“Oh, he would excel if he applied himself. But he will not so long as there are stars in the sky. And for all your talk about the stars being dead, they will outlast you and I, my chief.” The rustle of resettling fabric is followed by a faint yet unmistakable sound: a hand stroking a bare shoulder, toned from use of the bow. “All I’m saying, Uzuko, is that perhaps we should try again.”

A sharp inhale.

“Mind what you imply. It is not the Season.”

“I am impatient to right our wrong. I believe we can do better by the village. I would have another heir off you, chief Uzuko.”

“To have a child outside of the Season would be the greatest shame…”

The stroking continues; smooth, unhurried, intimate. A palm glides over tattooed pectorals, dry skin on skin. It gradually descends.

“Tell the village Anthos guided you. You are our spiritual leader. They have no choice but to trust…”

Smack.

Phraraq gasps. Uzuko curls his stinging palm, shoving her back rather than striking again. The hand that had smoothed his tattoos now cups her burning cheek. She blinks through the smoky atmosphere, the wind having tugged a grey curl from the bonfire to loiter by their door. Her eyes are moist from the particulates rather than the pain. Pharaqa is a huntress; she wouldn’t cry if you forced a burning cinder between her lips and made her whistle around it.

“Chief, I –“

“Do not waste your words on me. I understand now. You are _gsh-ryk,_ unloved-by-Anthos. Just like your son.”

“Chief!”

“And like him, your pollution must be weeded from our village before it spreads. I will create a new heir next Season with a less promiscuous mate.”

Gold-capped teeth champ. “I am the head huntress! Our people will not stand for this –“

“The number of carcasses you drag home cannot remedy this blight. Nothing can but the Banishment Ceremony, or _Za’gah._ **[Translator’s Note 4]** _Krz-qa-sza_ or death – you and your son decide your paths in the morning. Now get out of my sight.”

Ragged exhales. Retreating footsteps. Then approaching ones, blue feet crunching on bare earth. There follows a brief flurry of movement. The recording device is smothered in blankets. The Nova recruit forcibly slows his breathing, mimicking sleep, as the wefted partition is lifted.

“Poor madman,” comes Uzuko’s muffled voice, intended for himself alone to hear. He shakes his head, and the piercings that stud his drooping crest clatter and chime. “He deserves none of this. Luckily he claims his ‘ship’ is close to completion. That will make things easier on the village children, when he and Yondu are gone.”

**[1: there is no direct translation for what Pharaqa calls her husband here. That is probably for the best.]**

**[2: _Krz-qa-sza_** **translates as _undesirable,_ but also shares nuances with _outcast_ and _shunned_. The same word is used for Centaurians who have had their crests removed at the Banishing Ceremony.]**

**[3: _Gsh-ryk_ has negative sexual connotations, like ‘hedonist’ but more disparaging. It relates to copulation for purposes other than procreation. According to what little we know, Centaurians experience sexual attraction once a year for the specific purpose of reproduction. The existence of words like _Gsh-ryk_ indicate that this is only the norm though, not unanimous.]**

**[4: _Za’gah_ is a purification sacrifice. From recordings gathered over the course of the period that the _Eclector_ was stranded on Alpha Centauri-IV, it is considered outdated and barbaric by Zatoan standards. Chief Udonta III appears to be the exception.]**

 

* * *

 

 

Although Yondu never admits it out loud, he misses those days. Not the whistle and the accompanying blue spray, as his mother goaded his father to live up to his threats and commit the _Za’gah_ then and there on Anthos’s cheekbone, before the Great God’s eye. Not the blaring pain as his crest was hacked from his spine, severing a connection that Yondu had spent his whole life denying in favor of the far-off stars; or how he’d clenched his jaw so hard, determined not to scream, that his teeth cracked in his mouth like nutshells. Not the roar of the _Eclector’s_ engines – then a small and shoddily patched Nova ship, stained green-brown and trailing swamp water and algae, far from the city-scale fortress that he and Kraglin would name in its honor.

The stars though. Yondu misses the stars.

This is stupid, given that he’s made his home among them. But while the stars signify liberation from the Zatoan’s small-minded, small-planet ways, without his crest Yondu can’t hear them sing.

Chief Uzuko was right. Even if he hadn’t mutilated his son as a farewell gift, Yondu would hear only silence, because the stars only have silence to give. But lying here on his side, a lanky body sandwiched to his back and grubby nails chasing the spiral tattoos around his hips, watching those stars blur as the Ravager fleet activates their lightspeed drives one after the other and are sucked into hyperspace? Yondu doesn’t much care. Silence is fine – so long as you have someone to share it with.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Bruh you know I love comments.
> 
> But before you leave me some, pop on over to read RedRarebit's **_Away Away_**! A must for all y'all Kraglin fans.


End file.
